The Mexican authorities announced this Sunday that they stopped a truck in the south of the country in which more than 350 migrants of various nationalities were traveling.
Federal immigration agents made the discovery during a routine review at a checkpoint on a highway in the state of Veracruz, with a coastline on the Gulf of Mexico.
Agents asked to open the trailer doors when they heard voices coming from the back of the trailer and
found hundreds of people crammed into a dark, poorly ventilated compartment.
[Abandoned by coyotes or massacred by drug traffickers on the way to the United States: “If they kill you, who is going to claim you?”]
There are 294 citizens from Guatemala, 38 from Nicaragua, 15 from El Salvador, eight from Honduras and four from Ecuador, the National Migration Institute said in a statement.
The driver of the unit was arrested and made available to the Veracruz Attorney General's Office.
Human traffickers often transport migrants through Mexico for hundreds, even thousands of dollars.
But these types of journeys, in which migrants are hidden in truck trailers,
are often extremely dangerous
.
On December 9, 56 migrants died and more than 100 suffered serious injuries when the trailer in which they were traveling overturned on a highway in Chiapas, in the south of the country.
The survivors indicated that the speed at which the vehicle was going and the weight it was carrying would have influenced the accident.
This Saturday,
the first migrant caravan of the year departed from the city of San Pedro Sula
, in Honduras, with some 600 members who had the objective of crossing the southern border of the United States.
Upon reaching the border between Honduras and Guatemala, a part of the caravan dispersed and entered the Central American country through illegal routes.
Mexican authorities rescue 84 migrants crammed into the bed of a truck
Jan. 16, 202200:30
Some 300 migrants, mostly Hondurans and Nicaraguans, tried to pass through the border town of Corinto to reach Guatemala, but the authorities prevented them from passing, alleging that they did not meet the immigration requirements nor did they have the PCR diagnostic test to verify who are not infected with COVID-19.
During the night a group of migrants confronted hundreds of soldiers and riot police with stones, sticks and bottles, who used tear gas to disperse them.
15 Guatemalan police and military personnel were injured in the incident, reported the Government of that country.
With information from
The Associated Press
.
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